Surely the main performance index for a surgical hospital division is the utilization rate of the operation room. In the non emergency divisions, when interventions can be planned in advance, the maximization of the utilization index is accomplished by a careful scheduling of the patient arrivals into the hospital. In this paper a model of patient flow is built, indentified and applied to demonstrate that the optimization of individual stages of the process is impossible without a concurrent

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... trol of the entire routing from the incoming to the dismissal. Using data from a real hospital division we simulate the effect of different allocation schemes on the performance of the operation room. Health care systems; queueing networks, patient flow, stochastic processes I.